Abstract
It has been mainly only in the last decade that India started to look seriously at a diaspora policy, which is quite late given the fact that it has had a large diaspora for centuries. For a long time India’s official position was that emigrants deserted their country and harmed the country’s interests. At the time of economic liberalization and globalization in the 1990s ethnic networks started to be seen as value-free networks which could serve as a resource. Concomitantly, the diaspora’s economic and political situation greatly improved. This led to a swift change in government’s perception of its own migrants, applauding their achievements with great pride. While in the past, overseas emigrants were often referred to as non-required Indians (a parody of the term non-resident Indian (NRI)), nowadays they are addressed as ‘angels of development’ (Khadria, 2008), a source of national pride, members of the Indian family or ‘Mother India’s Children’ (Sinha-Kerkhoff and Bal, 2003).
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© 2013 Metka Hercog and Melissa Siegel
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Hercog, M., Siegel, M. (2013). Diaspora Engagement in India: From Non-Required Indians to Angels of Development. In: Collyer, M. (eds) Emigration Nations. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277107_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277107_4
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